Peter Foster is the Telegraph's US Editor based in Washington DC. He moved to America in January 2012 after three years based in Beijing, where he covered the rise of China. Before that, he was based in New Delhi as South Asia correspondent. He has reported for The Telegraph for more than a decade, covering two Olympic Games, 9/11 in New York, the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, the post-conflict phases in Afghanistan and Iraq and the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan.

Tribal livelihoods put under threat

Attended a rather moving press conference today organised by the pressure group ActionAid about the fate of Indian tribal people in Lanjigarh, Orissa who are being moved off their ancestral land to make way for an aluminium refinery.

The tribal farms could be bulldozed

This is a complex story. I visited the site about two years ago and wrote two articles about the situation down there and the FTSE-100 mining company involved, Vedanta.

The Chairman and founder of Vedanta, Anil Agarwal is profiled in the July 28th edition of the Economist magazine, which reports that from founding a scrap metal dealership in 1979 he now heads an international mining group worth Â£5bn. His personal worth is estimated at Â£2.5bn. Not bad for a boy who left school at 15.

The Lanjigarh project, however, has caused Vedanta and Mr Agarwal, considerable headaches since the local tribal people – a few of whom I met today – have been leading vigorous protests the plans to dig up the Niyamgiri Hills, which they hold sacred, and pour them into his Â£400m refinery.

Next week the Supreme Court of India is due to rule on whether Mr Agarwal's refinery is legal but I'll leave the details of the case for a later day.

For the tribal people the refinery is a disaster. They are being offered compensation of 1,00,000 rupees (Â£1,250) per acre for their land – which is market rate – but say with some justification they have no use for paper money. They also have no skills with which to benefit any possible job opportunities which the mine might create.

Most of them are also using 'common' land to grow millet while supplementing their agrarian lifestyle by hunting in the forests, digging tubers, plucking herbs and growing pineapples for sale at market.

No compensation is available for the loss 'common' land which they have used for generations, but have no legal title to, although a recently passed act of Parliament might soon change that.

Vedanta, which has already bulldozed two villages to make way for the plant, has built the displaced people a 'rehabilitation colony' – which I've visited – and which on paper marks a great improvement from the mud and thatch village houses it replaced.

There's a school, electricity, a community centre, plumbed toilets and other assorted amenities. The company says in a statement that the colony has "tremendously improved their [the tribals] standard of living compared with the facilities available earlier".

Such statements look good to concerned shareholders who would like reassurance that the company is fulfilling its Corporate Social Responsibilities, but from my experience of visiting the site, and talking to the tribal people today, there is a gap between the paper and concrete reality.

The tribal people have no use for bank accounts with 100,000 rupees. What they want is land to graze their animals and grow crops – not a concrete box of a house in a barbed wire compound – even if it does come with a 'community centre' – another, slightly larger concrete box.

India cannot stand still. It has 250m people to lift out of poverty. And to that end the current government has set demanding targets for indigenous aluminium production which won't be met unless someone like Mr Agarwal digs mines and builds smelters.

There is, therefore, a sound argument for digging up the tribals' sacred mountain in the 'national interest' even if – regrettably – that means destroying rivers and streams and a hugely bio-diverse area of Indian jungle.

However it seems to me that if that is to happen, the displaced people have to be given a fair deal in return for their sacrifice. The case has to be made, the environmental the pros and cons have to be fairly and publicly weighed up before decisions are taken.

This is not about fulfilling minimum 'paper' responsibilities, but about a moral responsibility to make a proper effort to ensure that the people are adequately resettled with land to graze animals and continue their way of life.

The mine, if it goes ahead, will swell the already overflowing coffers of Vedanta and Mr Agarwal considerably.

If for no other reason than self-interest (i.e. to get the protestors to shut up) a proper fraction of that potential wealth should be invested to compensate the people on whose land the bauxite lies.It seems to me that handing them a bank passbook with a few lakhs (100,000s) of rupees and building a 'hospital' – another concrete box with beds in it – really doesn't fulfil that obligation.

These are illiterate, itinerant tribal people. It may look like they live in poor conditions, but compared to a lot of rural India they survive (or did) very well on the natural bounty of the Niyamgiri Hills.

One of the activists at today's conference described their current situation in such limpid, poetic terms that I have to quote her in full.

"If we look at an earthworm in the mud, we might think it is dirty. But if we pluck it from that place, wash it clean and drop it in a golden bowl, will it survive?"